Chapter One: Electrification
I gulped down a large amount of my ice-cream. The sweet taste melted on my tongue.
"I'm never gonna get tired of this stuff," I said around the big cold lump in my mouth.
"Hard to believe you never had any until you were fifteen. That could almost be considered a sin," Fletcher said.
"Yeah, okay. In which religion?" I shot back at him.
"The god of archery's." When I looked over I saw he had a grin. I opened my mouth to shoot something back at him again but I was interrupted by Tess.
"Would you two grow up?" she asked irately.
"I'm perfectly grown up. Fletchers the one with..." I trailed off distracted by some kind of disturbance but couldn't put my finger on what it was. I guess you could call it an instinct. Or maybe it was just a side-effect of my paranoia.
"Ignis?" Tess's concerned voice was lost on me while I was trying to focus. "Ignis." She nudged me and I turned to look at her. "What is it?"
"Nothing, I replied. "Just my imagination." I wasn't perfectly sure that was all it was but I didn't sense anything nearby and I didn't hear, see, or smell anything weird so I let it go. Damn paranoia. There wasn't any need to worry them with it. Still, I watched the doors and windows.
"Okay then," Lexi's weirded out voice broke the silence that started to settle over the table.
I watched a girl walk in and saw her stand for a second before going on her way again. Is she checking out people's asses? I thought as she looked at people's backsides. I had no idea why she would ever do that considering how young she looked. She could be thirteen or so. A few years younger than me. Still she did so and when she stopped she walked over to a napkin holder and grabbed a stack before folding it until it was relatively thick. I wondered what she was doing and continued to watch her.
"Ignis?" Fletcher's voice was asking my attention this time but I ignored it. The girl had something strange about her. Her clothes were a bit beat up. The black sweatshirt she wore had patches where the color was worn out and her jeans had rips in them that weren't for fashion. Yet she held herself normally. Not looking for attention but not looking for ignorance either. She was just casual like everything she did was normal. Which wasn't true at all.
It clicked in his head what she was doing when she went up behind some guy and slid the napkins in his back pocket where his wallet was and started to pull out his wallet. She was good. Nobody would have noticed if someone hadn't bumped into her causing her to bump into him. He turned around and gave her a dirty look then did a double take when he saw his wallet. I heard her say something weird and turn to run. A few people had looked over at them when the guy caught her arm and held her back.
"Let go," she spat at him and her brown hair tumbled around her shoulders when she tried to pull free.
"Looks like I caught myself a thief," the guy sneered and any pity I felt for him losing his wallet vanished. "Perhaps I should bring you down to the station. See what your parents think when they find out."
"Du arschloch," she said another weird thing that I didn't understand. "Lemme go."
"She's German," Tess said to me. I looked up at her and found my friends were all watching the chaos.
"What did she say?" I asked her.
"I'm not sure what but she called him a name or something. She said 'you something.'"
I turned my focus back over to the conflict. The girl was staring daggers at the man. I could feel her energy getting stronger, fueled by anger. I was surprised she held so much emotion because I'd seen a lot of pissed off faces and hadn't felt the kind of energy she was containing before.
"Let me go." The girl had lowered her voice menacingly.
"Not happening." He yanked her arm and she leaped at him slamming the palms of her hands on his temples. A move I hadn't seen before and puzzled me because the man screamed in pure agony before dropping to his knees.
It happened so fast but I did see it. Electricity between the girls hands and his skull before she reached into a pocket under her sweatshirt and pulled out a handmade grenade of some type and pulled the fuse. She closed her eyes and instinctively I followed. I heard her throw it and heard it bang and my ears rang for several seconds. A stun grenade. I stood up and bolted for the door while people were still recovering. I saw my friends follow despite the fact they had probably gotten the full dose from it. The girl wasn't normal and I wanted to know why.
My feet landed heavily on the ground as I followed the girl. I could see her sprinting impossibly fast ahead of me. The speed she could accomplish was unnatural which only made me want to catch up with her more. She took a hard right down an alleyway. My feet skidded for a second when I tried to replicate her move. I sprinted down the same alley and paused when I reached an intersection. I looked both ways and realized she was gone. Where the fuck did she go? My hearing was coming back but I couldn't hear her footsteps. The energy I had felt in her had vanished soon after she threw the grenade and I couldn't sense it anymore. Artemis would've been able to but she wasn't with me.
I kicked a dumpster that was close by and she rocketed out of it at full speed. I cursed and took of after her again. Why did she hide and give herself away so easily. Her speed was double what it was before and I had trouble keeping up. I chased her and she suddenly went down a different alley again and I skidded again to make the turn. She didn't hide again instead she ran clean out onto the street and took off down the sidewalk. I weaved through the people after her and saw her slide into another alley. I was tired of running and decided to end the chase. I followed her round another corner and snapped my fingers. Fire roared up at the end and the girl skidded to a stop and turned to face me terror clear on her face. She coughed and gasped for air while leaning against the wall.
"Verdammt," she managed. "The hell d'ya want?" She spoke English as well as I could and didn't really have an accent either. I guessed someone she knew spoke German and she had learned some from them.
"The hell do I want?" I didn't actually know the answer to that question. I knew what I wanted but I didn't know how you would put that into words. I just felt stupid. I had chased her down only to realize I had no idea what to do once I caught up with her. "Can we just talk for like ten minutes?"
"Why?" she exhaled heavily and coughed.
"Seriously, I just want to talk." I tried to keep my voice calm.
"Yeah okay. You just want to talk in an abandoned warehouse where you'll pull out your desert eagle and bam I'm dead and you can do whatever the hell you want with my body."
"That's disgusting. Why would I even want to kill you in the first place?" My voice raised unintentionally from her accusation.
"I don't know. People have gone after me calling themselves slayers on the side of god." She spat.
"Slayers? Where do you live?" I asked. I couldn't help but group her with me and Artemis especially if she had been abandoned. Slayers might have tried hunting her down because she was part demon and if she was than that would mean she was a blessed.
She didn't move or respond for several seconds and I felt her energy rocket again. I took a step back just in case. I didn't know what kind of abilities she had but I was sure I could dodge them and manage to keep her in place with my flames. "Wiedersehen arschloch," she muttered and leaped up curling her fingers around a drainage pipe.
I moved to try and stop her and found myself on the ground. Pain seared through me and my back arched. Fucking hell, I thought unsure of what was going on. I didn't have control of myself. The more I tried to control my movements the more it hurt so I gave up. Suddenly, as quickly as it started it stopped and I breathed in a couple heavenly breaths before I struggled to my feet. My fingers hurt and when I examined them I found they had blistered. I looked up at the top of the drainage pipe and found as I expected that the girl was nowhere to be found. I jetted up to the top and landed softly down. Still no sign of her. I decided to let her go. I could take Artemis with me to try and find her later. She would probably trust me more if I had a little girl with me but like me and Artemis she could probably act unpredictably. I jumped off the top of the building and stopped my decent by giving a quick jet before I hit the ground.
I walked out onto the street and found my friends running up to me. They had lost me in the people on the sidewalk and had waited.
"Are you okay?" Lexi was the first to speak up.
"Yeah I'm fine."
"You're bleeding!" she exclaimed and snatched my hand looking at my palm. "How did this happen?" I hadn't even noticed before but my nails had sliced into my skin from clenching my fist so hard.
"That's a long story. Why don't we talk about it back at HQ?" I was exhausted and wanted to sit down before trying to explain something that didn't make total sense in my mind.
We made our way back to the parking garage that had HQ underneath it. The lady cleared us and we went inside to the elevator to go down into the lobby. I called Artemis who was playing over in the middle of the room over and the five of us settled onto a couple couches.
"Sooo? What did you see?" Fletcher asked impatiently.
"That girl was weird."
"No shit Sherlock. She was probably homeless. I mean, she did try to pickpocket a man and she was quite thin. It looked like her clothes were pretty old, too," Tess put in.
"Well yeah, but she had this weird aura about her. Kind of like mine and Artemis' but not. It was hard to detect but it was powerful a couple times."
"Okay... so she's a little special. Why does that matter?" Fletcher asked me yawning.
"Shut the fuck up, Fletch. Do you remember she blinded you at B and J's?" He looked at me but didn't say anything. I sighed and continued, "I think she might be a Blessed. When I was chasing her she paralyzed me. I just spazzed out on the ground for awhile and she was long gone by the time I could get up."
"What do you mean by spazzing out paralyzed?" Tess asked me curiously.
"Okay. I was about to try and chase her when suddenly all of my limbs locked and my fist clenched my jaw clenched, my toes clenched, my back arched and I couldn't get out of it. Is that enough information for you?"
"Yes actually. I think she probably has control over electricity."
"Okay I thought it was probably more along the lines of human bodies but okay."
"Did you ever take biology Ig? Cause they have a whole lesson consisting of using electricity to make frog muscles contract. Add that to the burns on your fingers from where it might've jumped in or out and it looks like it's electricity."
Why was everyone so much smarter than me?
"Hey, I think I've seen her somewhere before," Lexi said. "Yeah, it was bothering me because she looked familiar but I didn't know from where."
"Where?" I asked her interested.
"This video game shop had a bunch of people around it when I went there. That girl was playing some game inside and they were broadcasting it to TVs in all the windows."
"I have a question." Fletcher raised his hand.
"What is it?" she sighed.
"What the hell were you doing in a game store?"
"Um..." Lexi's cheeks turned red which only made me more curious.
"Come on Lexi. Out with it," Fletcher tormented her with a nice big grin on his face.
"Hey Ignis. If Lexi saw her there playing games wouldn't it make sense for her to go back?" Artemis's young voice was right next to me.
"Yeah she probably would," I told her. I turned to Lexi, "Which store was it?"
"I think it was called Bob's Games or something."
Alas a google search and a short walk later we found our destination which ended up being called "Bobby's Games" instead.
It was much like Lexi described it as. A little shop with some people (mostly nerds) clustering around it watching TV screens and between those screens I could see the fucking bitch that had paralyzed me. She sat on an armchair with her knees tucked into her chest and a controller in her hands staring at a screen. A candycane stuck out of her mouth and she moved it to the other side occasionally. We entered and the owner behind the counter stood up looked at me.
"Get out," he said.
"What did I do?" I asked holding up my hands innocently.
"I heard all about you and-"
"Drop it, Bob," the girls voice cut in. She didn't stop gaming away at what I could tell was the legendary difficulty setting of Halo Reach. No wonder why the nerds were watching outside. "He can't do anything here. His picture's already been captured by five different cameras and there are plenty of witnesses outside unless he decided to become a serial killer which he probably already is except he's exposed to large amounts of beer, wine, and drugs which means he's probably involved with a gang or the mafia. More likely the mafia since there's expensive cars and a parking garage that's down around the more mafia-like part of town. The only problem with that asumption is that he's just a teenager."
"Okay, that's creepy," Fletcher said.
"Not as creepy as your mind. Seriously, girls won't sleep with such a dumb ass," she muttered.
For once Fletcher shut up and I couldn't help but chuckle. She was creepy as hell and not very friendly but she had hit part of Fletcher's personality pretty solidly.
"I want to challenge this cheating bitch!" A kid who looked even more nerdy than some of the others came in and sat in a seat next to the girl. The girl kicked a controller towards him without taking her eyes off the screen as she exited the level she was on and pulled up multiplayer. "You're going down," the kid spat at her.
"Uh huh." The girl didn't seem to believe him.
The two players spawned on opposite sides of the map and the girl went straight for a banshee while the nerd went for a warthog. She pulled up as high as she could and circled before going back down and "landing" rather roughly on a small cliff that the nerd had to drive around to the other side of to get to her. Which was exactly what she wanted him to do. When he started to go under the cliff she had her character leap off over him tilting the control stick so her character looked down into the vehicle and threw a plasma grenade. The nerd didn't even notice and swung the warthog around to face her. He started to charge her but the grenade went off and his character went flying rather hilariously a good distance across the map.
"Fuck," the nerd cursed. "Another round."
I turned to Bobby while the two of them battled it out again. "Why does she just sit here and play games?" I asked him.
"While that isn't any of your business, the poor thing doesn't have any parents and has survived mainly off of dumpster diving. We let her test all the used games for minimum wage. She brings quite a crowd over and our profits have raised a bit since she came."
"She's homeless?"
Bob seemed to regret part of what he said and looked away. Everything added up pretty solidly to her being a blessed but I didn't think it was possible for her to go unnoticed for that long with all the slayers around. Although she had mentioned people had come after her before.
"She did tell me she was looking for something." I looked up at Bob surprised that he was suddenly so open. "The only reason why I'm telling you is because I've seen her blow through many people with a single strike to their temples. I think she smashes their eardrums but I'm not sure." He flicked a piece of dark curly hair out of his eyes. "If you mess with her I'm sure she'll find a way to take you down."
"Yeah, I've learned my lesson about cornering her." I rubbed my fingers together without realizing it.
"So I've heard. What exactly do you want with her anyways?"
"I just want to talk to her but she clearly doesn't want to."
"It's not that I don't want to, Ignis. It's that I don't trust you or any of your kind for that matter," the girl spoke like she was shedding wisdom on me and I got the sudden urge to slap her but resisted the temptation.
"What did I ever do to you?" Her trust issues were becoming problematic.
"You are one of them," she snapped and I could see she let her teeth clamp down in frustration. "All you do is go 'trust me. I'm such a wonderful young person.' and the next thing I know I have a gun to my chest and barely make it out alive."
"Hey, don't assume that's what I was planning." I got distracted by the girls sudden standing position. She killed the nerd and set down the controller before turning to face me.
She tilted her head and I saw she seemed to be focusing on her breathing. "Alright then. Let's go and talk."
I blinked. "Seriously? Now you want to talk?"
"Well, why the hell not? The names Scar by the way." She told me.
"Scar? Like the bad guy from The Lion King?" Artemis's sweet voice spoke up from behind me.
"No. Scar short for Scarlette. My name is Scarlette." Scar said and crouched down to Artemis's level and stared deep into her eyes. Though that was a little weird Artemis didn't really care. "Where do you want to talk?"
"I don't know. It just needs to be private." I shrugged. "Why don't you guys go... do something," I told my friends who had stood awkwardly trying to avoid the gazes of the other people. I didn't want to make this girl feel overwhelmed by having a lot of people around her all of the sudden.
"Suuuure. We'll just go and dilly dally somewhere while you and this female person go somewhere private... alone," Fletcher said and accomplished making everything very awkward. I glanced at Scar and saw her making a face at Fletcher. She was too young to fully grasp the concept but she knew what his goal had been and she didn't like it.
I started to head out the door and glanced behind me to see if the girl was following and nearly had a heart attack when I found she was right on my heels. Scar was pretty damn quiet when she walked and she walked weird. On her toes with her heels barely touching the ground for a split second and I realized it made her look taller. It was probably a defensive technique to ward people away though I doubted it helped her much. I noticed Fletcher heading towards the controller Scar had set down. Bob didn't seem to care so I didn't worry.
"Do you have parents?" I asked Scar who I ended up standing in a nearby alley with.
"Nope. Never have," she replied.
"Okay, ever been called a half breed?" I continued with another question I knew the answer to if she was a Blessed.
"What would you know about it?" she asked.
I lifted my hand and conjured a flame the size of a quarter in it. She nodded.
"Yes. I have and I don't care to share my entire life story with you." She looked uncomfortable. I couldn't blame her. I looked like a delinquent and she didn't know me.
"That's fine but if you're a Blessed then... well there aren't many of us and I'm interested to meet new people that understand this." I gestured to the flame in my hand before snuffing it out.
"A Blessed? Is that what they call half-demon half-human people?" She tilted her head again.
"Yea- wait. How did you know that you were part demon?"
She blinked and didn't reply for a few seconds. "I can't tell you."
"Okay... Well, what exactly can you do? What are your abilities?"
She held up to fingers and I saw sparks arch from the tips.
"Electrocution?"
"Electrification. Electrocution is when I kill someone with it." Scar let her hand drop down. "I'm not sure even that is it. I just move around those little things that make materials materials."
"What?" I asked. She had lost me.
"You know those nanoscopic things that make gold gold and salt salt."
"Do you mean like you can break bonds to break materials down?" I started to see what she was talking about. The electrons that made atoms unique to one another a lot of times.
"Yeah. Like if you brought me salt I could break it down into two different substances. The one is really delicates and I use it in these." She pulled out a grenade of some sort. It was clearly homemade.
I picked up a pebble. "Break this down."
She took it from me and rubbed the surface of it. She closed her eyes and focused. I watched the pebble's surface ripple and suddenly melt into tiny piles of fine powder. Each pile had a different color and I guessed they were all different elements. She held it out to me like she wanted to give it to me but I just shook my head and she tipped it over to dump it onto the ground. The dust hung in the air for several seconds before finally settling.
"So you can use alchemy?" I asked a sudden interest had slithered into my head from her ability.
"Heck no. It's not like I can just pull gold from led and diamonds from a pile of carbon. I can't bond materials together very well. It takes time and a lot of energy to do that, Breaking materials down? Sure. Bonding them back together? Not really."
"Still, that's awesome. Why-" I was cut off by her suddenly whipping her head to stare down the alley. She stiffened like she wanted to run. "What?" I asked but then I felt it to.
Two nightmares in full wolfy form came barrelling down the alley and seemed to fight over which one could get to us first. Scar glanced behind her like she wanted to run.
"There's just two. No big deal," I said. Then I noticed that there were a lot more than only two. They were up on the roof tops and I saw two silhouettes just outside the alley.
Scar shook. She shook like she was scared. The first time I saw any real emotion in her other than frustration. She swallowed.
"Fuck" I said. "Do you know how to fight?"
"Not really. Until a little while ago I had a sword but then some bastards stole it. I don't know how to do hand to hand. I always depended on the range of my sword if I had to kill these things." She took a step closer to me. She could see I knew how to fight.
A nightmare finally managed to stop fighting with the other and lunged towards us. It's claws aimed straight for Scar.